10 US sailors, 2 US Navy boats reportedly held in Iranian custody

US
Navy riverine patrol boats, of the kind detained by Iran on
Tuesday.Wikimedia
Commons

Ten American sailors are reportedly being held by Iran after two
US Navy riverine patrol boats drifted into Iranian waters
after experiencing mechanical difficulties.

Iran had originally told the US that the sailors would be
returned "promptly," but officials now say that the sailors will
spend the night in Iran, according
to a CNN report.

Plans are now apparently in place for
Iran to
return the sailors to the Navy on Wednesday
morning, Gulf time, a US defense official told Reuters.

"Earlier today, we lost contact with two small US naval craft en
route from Kuwait to Bahrain," a senior administration official
told Business Insider.

The official continued: "We subsequently have been in
communication with Iranian authorities, who have informed us of
the safety and well-being of our personnel. We have received
assurances the sailors will promptly be allowed to continue their
journey."

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told CNN that "we've
received assurances from the Iranians that our sailors are safe."

The boats apparently experienced mechanical difficulties and
drifted into Iranian-claimed waters while the 10 sailors aboard
were on a training mission, officials told
NBC. Iran has now seized the 10 American sailors, who are
reportedly
being held at an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps base on Farsi
Island in the Persian Gulf.

The semiofficial Fars news agency in Iran said that members of
the hardline IRGC had confiscated GPS equipment from the boats,
according to The New York Times. The news
agency said the data from the equipment would "prove that the
American ships [were] 'snooping' around in Iranian waters."

Google Earth/Amanda Macias/Business
Insider

A senior US administration official told
CNN's Jim Sciutto that there's nothing to indicate anything
hostile on the part of Iran. Administration officials also
reportedly said that releasing the sailors at night would be
"unsafe."

Another US official, however, told
CNN's Barbara Starr that the IRGC confiscated the sailors'
communications equipment, which is hostile.

The Navy ships were reportedly near Iran's Farsi Island to
refuel, according
to Sciutto.

Sciutto said
it's possible the ships ran out of fuel or accidentally wandered
into Iranian waters.

If the ships did mistakenly travel into Iranian waters, however,
the first course of action wouldn't typically be to detain the
ships and their crews, Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for
research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told
Business Insider.

"The traditional response would be to issue some kind of warning
rather than to detain the ship, and now ... they're going to be
detaining 10 sailors overnight, which is obviously not
insignificant," Schanzer said.

Iranian
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.Thomson Reuters

Ben Rhodes, the White House's deputy national security adviser,
told reporters that the US is "working to resolve the situation
such that any US personnel are returned to their normal
deployment."

A senior US official told The Associated Press that US Secretary
of State John Kerry immediately called Iran's minister of foreign
affairs, Javad Zarif, upon learning of the incident at around
12:30 p.m. EST.

Kerry "personally engaged with Zarif on this issue to try to get
to this outcome," the official said.

The latest incident comes on the heels of Iran's
rocket test in late December near US warships and boats
passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

The incident also comes hours before US President Barack Obama is
due to give his final State of the Union address before Congress.

This is not the first time Iran has detained Western navy sailors
operating in or near Iranian waters.

In 2004, 15 British Royal Navy personnel from a training team
based in southern Iraq were detained while delivering a boat from
Umm Qsar to Basra,
the Telegraph noted.